Digital Storytelling

Incorporating digital storytelling into your classroom provides students with the opportunity to work on a number of literacy skills. Students are required to write to create a script. Since their digital stories will be published, more time is spent creating quality writing. Students go through the whole writing process to create a script. Moreover, digital storytelling requires students to do creative and independent thinking and it is teaching them 21^st century literacy skills. If done as a group project, digital storytelling teaches students to work together and collaborate. Before I thought digital storytelling had to be a video, but after I watched Digital Storytelling in Plain English it turns out it can be podcasts too! The same process that is used to make digital story videos can also be used to create book trailers. I am working with one of my students now to create a book trailer. We’re in the learning process together. We started by watching a number of examples of digital book trailers. Her favorite was for the book Fat Vampire

In addition to an English classroom, digital storytelling can be used across the content areas. I found a digital story teaching a math lesson which I thought would be great to include in the classroom. I would find or create digital stories and make them available to my students to teach math lessons which they may have missed, or they might need extra help with when they go home to do their homework at night. Students could even create the math digital stories and share them with their peers. Here is one example of a math digital story: